The ISIS Project

ISIS is a system developed out of a study of fault
tolerance in distributed systems. The system implements a collection of
techniques for building software for distributed systems that performs well, is
robust despite both hardware and software crashes,
and exploits parallelism. The basic approach is to provide a toolkit
mechanism for distributed programming, whereby a distributed system is
built by interconnecting fairly conventional nondistributed programs,
using tools drawn from the kit. Tools are included for managing
replicated data, synchronizing distributed computations, automating
recovery, and dynamically reconfiguring a system to accommodate
changing workloads. ISIS has become very successful: hundreds of
companies and Universities currently employ the toolkit in settings
ranging from financial trading floors to telecommunications switching
systems.

The
Horus project
was originally perceived as a redesign of the Isis
group communication system, but has evolved into a general purpose
communication architecture with advanced support for the development of
robust distributed systems in wide variety of settings. A first version
of the Horus software is available to research institutions at no cost.